I am looking for an external hard drive for my windows pased pc and laptop. My desktop runs op xp and my laptop is vista. What I want an external hard drive for is saving of lots of digital pictures and maybe some mp3 but mainly just a safe place to keep all my digital photos. My question is this,I have been looking at inexpensive drives like the western digital's. I am wondering if it would be better to go with a slower portable external drive that holds about 320gigs or a desktop version that holds about 500gigs for the same price. I really don't intend on taking this around too awful much if ever at all. all the reviews i have read offer mixed opinions,some say get the one that is powered by the usb cord while others say to go with the regular one and plug it in. also see alot of talk around the usb/firewire connections,however most of the specs i have seen show the same transfer speed of 480mbps. which is the best way to go to save some pictures? we also keep all of our memory cards from the camera after filling them up as a backup,but I am kinda new to all the digital photo backups and just wanna make sure i have copies of my memories safe for years to come.
480Mbps is because they use USB, which is a slower interface than the speed of a typical Hard disk drive (limited to 30MB/s versus a hard drive's 60-80MB/s). The USB powered drives will always be small 2.5" drives that you can practically fit in your pocket, but are expensive. The ones that need mains power are usually bigger 3.5" drives which will be cheaper for large storage amounts, but more bulky.
